Niall O'Grady

I spent six months at SAP Dublin in the Message Solving team as part of a work placement during my third year at university. It was an excellent experience, so on graduating I wanted to see if they had anything going before I looked elsewhere. After contacting the HR department and applying speculatively for a job, I was invited for an interview. Two interviews and three weeks later, I was offered my current position on the Business One team in Galway.

My company supplies software for businesses and one of our products is a business management software application. Sometimes a company will want to add new functionality or automate a sequence of actions with this application and they do this by creating an 'add-on' with a library that we provide: I provide support for any issues with this library.

Most of my work involves figuring out what customer issues are and how to fix them. For example, if a customer is having problems with an add-on, I work with them to locate the area that's causing the trouble. I create a step-by-step scenario that reproduces the issue, and then either suggest a change or investigate further.

There are about 30 support consultants based in my team in Galway. There is an ongoing queue of all incoming support requests, and although much of our time is spent dealing with these, there are opportunities to work on bigger projects too. I'm currently working on a project to create a central system that we can test on. Once it's up and running, it'll mean that at the end of my working day I can pass urgent projects over to colleagues in China or India who'll be able to carry on from exactly where I've left off.

At the end of my first year I was sent to India for two weeks of training, which allowed me to experience a new culture that I otherwise might never have seen. It was also great to meet colleagues I'd worked with the previous year without having seen them in person.

My job is very rewarding – it's hugely satisfying solving problems for our clients. In years to come I’d like to be a software developer, but for now I'm very happy where I am.